” President Obama is unveiling a $3.99 trillion budget that is “designed to bring middle class economics into the 21st Century,” the White House announced Monday.

The proposed budget “invests in helping working families make their paychecks go further, preparing hardworking Americans to earn higher wages, and creating the infrastructure that allows businesses to thrive and create good, high-paying jobs,” the White House said in a statement.

To pay for new tax credits and other programs involving education, child care, paid leave, and new road and bridge construction, the budget calls for tax hikes on wealthier Americans by closing certain loopholes.

Congressional Republicans said the president’s proposals — many of which leaked out in advance of Monday’s announcement — involve too many tax hikes and high-spending programs.”

Here are just a few of the goodies to be redistributed by the State under “Uncle” Barack’s proposed budget :

” Among the economic plans in the proposed budget:

• A child care tax credit of up to $3,000 per child.

• $750 million for a Department of Education preschool development program, an increase of $500 million.

• More than $3 billion for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education.

• A $500 tax credit for “second earners” in working families.

• A program encouraging paid leave programs for employees.

• Two years of community college tuition for qualified students, a program that would cost $60 billion over 10 years.

” Last November, Los Angeles Unified School District lawyers fighting a civil lawsuit argued in court that a 14-year-old middle school student was mature enough to consent to having sex with her 28-year-old teacher, and that she bore some responsibility for what happened. The district’s attorneys also introduced the girl’s sexual history into the trial as part of their defense strategy.

Two legal experts sharply criticized the school district for using those tactics. They also said the case highlights a little-known conflict in California law: while the age of consent is firmly set at 18 in criminal cases, at least two appellate court rulings have found that in civil cases, it is possible to argue that a minor can consent to sex with an adult.

Last November’s case involved a math teacher at Thomas Edison Middle School in Southeast Los Angeles who in December 2010 began a six-month sexual relationship with a girl who went to the school. The teacher, Elkis Hermida, was convicted of lewd acts against a child and sentenced in July 2011 to three years in state prison. “

The elections went from November 29th until noon on December 19th and involved 408 collective bargaining units around the state associated with school districts. Workers cast their votes using a telephone voting system.

AFSCME Local 60 Council 40, including support staff in the Sun Prairie School District, was the largest union to be decertified. Only 135 of the 367 members voted to recertify.

Substitute teachers with the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association also decertified with 128 of 320 members voting for the union. “

” Most reforms are like rocks that land in an empty field. They don’t anger anyone because they don’t challenge any vested interests. But in 2010, Democratic state Sen. Gloria Romero of East Los Angeles introduced the Parent Empowerment Act, which passed the Legislature and was signed into law by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Better known as the “parent trigger” law, it allows parents of students attending schools that continually fall below state and federal testing standards to force district officials to make significant changes. If 51 percent of parents sign the requisite petitions, parents can insist on a new principal or turn the school into a charter.

The law has only been applied a handful of times. But such efforts have been opposed politically and in the courts by the state’s teachers’ unions, which still are furious about it three years later. Newspapers report that United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), the city’s main teachers’ union, voted to recruit a legislator to carry a bill that would “reform” the law.”

” On Sunday, The Washington Post ran a house editorial that should shame not just all the education bureaucrats and rank-and-file teachers in the District of Columbia but all across the country.

The basic points of the editorial are not at issue:

1. D.C.’s publicly funded charter schools outperform conventional public schools. That’s one of the reasons why 40 percent of the District’s kids voluntarily enroll in them and why thousands are on waiting lists.

2. D.C.’s charter schools get about $16,000 in funding per pupil, compared to $29,000 per pupil for traditional schools.

3. The District’s education establishment has made it next to impossible for charters to rent closed school buildings in a vindictive move to screw over competitors offering a cheaper, better alternative.”

” Sure proof of the failure of the country’s education system is the fact that Americans, the casualties of that system, could listen to President Obama’s remarks on education in his 2013 State Of The Union speech and not laugh him out of the hall.

In his speech, Obama dished out the standard “education is the key and the government needs to spend more” drivel. But those whose critical skills were not damaged by the government institutes the president purports to improve will see the fraud to which parents and students have been subjected to for decades.

Obama’s laundry list of policy proposals starts with a new entitlement: pre-school for all. He also wants our system to graduate “high school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges, so that they’re ready for a job,” an idea that has been floating around for decades.

Obama wants “tax credits, grants, and better loans” to help kids go to college; he already has orchestrated a quasi-takeover of lending to college students and has relaxed loan repayment terms. And he wants to fight the high cost of higher educations by ensuring “that affordability and value are included in determining which colleges receive certain types of federal aid.” “

” The school choice movement is extraordinary because it’s not inspired by any political figure. Instead, it’s an organic, grassroots parent movement inspired by extreme dissatisfaction with the status quo. It is a purely American protest movement, uniquely bipartisan and multicultural. But it’s more than a protest movement; it has become a successful, constructive change agent.

I can’t imagine an industry more ripe for restructuring than K-12 education. Governments run this monopoly, spending nearly $600 billion annually on K-12 education. Meanwhile, SAT scores recently hit a 40-year low. (Here come the parents with the pitchforks.) ”